Lag Spikes and Bad Latency on Good Connection

Hey all, this isn't just a WoW problem. I have lag and inconsistent latency mostly in battle on WoW, and League of Legends also. And even other games and downloading stuff.

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/2867689476

http://www.pingtest.net/result/84354686.png

As you can see it says I have a good ping and a good connection speed. But on WoW the ping changes like every minute from as low as 90 to jumping to 500 to jumping to 900. And in combat every fight I'll get a 1 second lag spike. Same thing on League of Legends I notice it in combat mostly.

My router is like 12 years old. Linksys WRT54G. Could this be the problem? I believe all the firmware is up to date. I even tried forwarding ports and everything. Why does ping all of a sudden become to spiky and bad when I log onto a game? I am playing wireless on a laptop but my signal strength is perfect and it's not framerate issues.

Also I believe the Home Latency is usually very low when I check it in game at almost all times while still having a 500-900 WoW latency.

Actually, the backbone used by your playing a game is essentially paid for by YOUR ISP.

For the game to start communicating with Blizzard's servers, you send the networking packets from your computer to your ISP. Your ISP then uses their backbone provider to move your packets out onto the world wide internet via their backbone provider(s).

Those backbone providers then use their internal recently tracked information about other people needing access to blizzard's servers to forward your packets onwards to blizzard's servers. When Blizzard responds, it sends back the responses along the same path that you essentially initiated.

The problem with AT&T has been going on for a while, and several ISPs are currently in the process of yelling and screaming at AT&T. Blizzard is also working with AT&T (and other ISPs) to help those ISPs/backbone providers to fix the problem- since it wasn't caused by Blizzard.

All networking equipment is suppose to handle all valid internet packets. The only thing the equipment/ISPs/Backbone providers *may* do is to throttle or otherwise limit the flow of valid internet packets. As long as blizzard uses valid packets, nothing they change in the game should be delayed/blocked/dropped by the networking companies.